5 Questions With Family Studies: Michael Toscano Introduces the Family First Technology Initiative

The Institute for Family Studies officially launches the Family First Technology Initiative today, consolidating several years of original research on the effects of smartphones, social media, and online pornography on children's mental health and the quality of adult relationships. Our research has made the IFS a leader in developing model policies for state and federal lawmakers. Working in partnerships with other groups, we have seen more than a dozen laws implemented nationwide to make the internet safer for kids, with Americans now thinking more about how technology can benefit, and not harm, families and child welfare. 

Over the next several years, the Family First Technology Initiative will produce original reports, develop model policies, and evaluate the effects of new technologies, like Artificial Intelligence, on American family life. I recently spoke to IFS executive director Michael Toscano about this exciting new initiative. (The following interview has been edited for clarity).

Chris Bullivant: As executive director, you are overseeing the launch of the Family First Technology Initiative and will be personally involved in the research and policy portions. Please tell us what inspired it.

Michael Toscano: In September 2019, IFS Founder Brad Wilcox and I were invited to give a presentation to a group of mothers with children enrolled in private schools in the Richmond area. Our comments were geared toward discussion of our classic research, and we ended our talk with an exhortation to our hosts to become ambassadors for marriage. Afterwards, as many as six moms engaged us in a discussion that totally surprised us. They politely thanked us for our work but wondered if we had “anything on social media and smartphones.” As we learned, their daughters and sons were severely addicted to these technologies, and they were worried that something was critically wrong with them. That’s one of the things that inspired our interest in this issue and led to several of our reports on technology and the family.

More generally, it is no longer possible to deny the radical effects of social media and smartphones on our children. We can all see it with our own eyes, but the research, including our own, has also reached a consensus on the matter. In her latest book, Generations, psychologist and IFS friend Jean Twenge assesses the mental health scores of Gen Z, the first generation of so-called “digital natives.” She finds that loneliness, self-harm, suicide attempts, anxiety, etc. have all skyrocketed since 2012, when access to smartphones and social media became standard for living, even for kids. “The [negative] trends are stunning in their consistency, breadth, and size,” she writes. Her work is fully supported by a May 2023 advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General, who declared that social media presents “a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” Likewise, Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation makes a compelling case, with a mountain of data, that early access to smartphones and social media is damaging our kids. 

Over the next several years, the Family First Technology Initiative will continue to evaluate how these devices and platforms shape our lives and families. 

Bullivant: What about the policy side? What’s the history there?

Toscano: Our policy work was inspired by our growing sense of alarm that something had to be done. So, we convened a working group in June 2022 that included Clare Morell at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), Adam Candeub at the Center for Renewing America and Michigan State University, Jean Twenge, Brad Wilcox and myself. We hammered out ideas that we thought would help give parents more power over what their kids see and do online. We released a policy brief two months later in August 2022, and to our shock, Governor Spencer Cox of Utah saw it online, was inspired by what he read, and it became a law there basically nine months later. Since then, several other states have followed suit. 

Alas, Big Tech lobbyists are trying to get this kind of legislation beaten in Court, though we believe we have a strong hand in the long run. In the meantime, we have contributed meaningfully to the advancement of laws requiring the age verification of pornography sites in 19 states. And we have helped develop model policies to make app stores safe for kids, which have traction currently on the federal level, with Representative John James (R-MI) recently introducing an amendment based upon them to federal legislation. We have also been honored to endorse the Kids Online Safety Act (which the House should step up and pass in a manner that is faithful to the Senate bill). It has been an incredible ride, to say the least, with a lot more to come.

The Family First Technology Initiative is a necessary response to help families in their 'David versus Goliath' struggle against Big Tech. 

I must emphasize that it’s been a totally collaborative effort. We have worked closely with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Center for Renewing America, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, Protect Young Eyes, the Digital Progress Institute, the American Principles Project, and the Heritage Foundation—which generously awarded us and EPPC a joint Innovation Prize for this work—to mention just a few. I want to make a special mention of the Family Policy Alliance, which has emerged as a champion on these issues, putting advocacy muscle behind these policy ideas. We are up against Big Tech, an industry with power beyond comprehension. To get this work done requires a group effort. 

Bullivant: Explain more about how the Family First Technology Initiative fits in with the overall mission of the Institute?

Toscano: Ten years ago, the Institute for Family Studies was founded to analyze and ameliorate the family crisis. At the time, we saw that marriage and family were apparently in trouble, but what was really happening and why? Answering those questions has been at the heart of our work. Yet, in the years since, other critical challenges facing the American family emerged, and in response we expanded the scope of our work to address them: in this case, the technology crisis. 

The Family First Technology Initiative is, in part, about helping parents parent. Today, because of our children’s immersion into the world of electronics from their earliest years, raising healthy kids is now increasingly difficult, if not downright impossible. 

But there is also an issue for adult relationships. In a 2023 study, Wendy Wang and I found that married couples, where one partner is a heavy phone user, are more prone to consider divorce and experience a general feeling of loneliness. So, this is an issue for marriages as well. Parents who are addicted to their phones—which is basically all of us—have to exert extreme discipline in order to give our kids the attention they deserve. As a matter of habit, parents prefer to scroll through placeless electronic networks than be present with their families. This is inflicting extraordinary psychological damage on our kids and on one another.

The Family First Technology Initiative is a necessary response to help families in their David versus Goliath struggle against Big Tech. 

Bullivant: As you are aware, we are in the midst of an era of change with some amazing but also scary new technologies, like AI. Will the Family First Technology Initiative have something to say about them?

Toscano: Yes. The Family First Technology Initiative will seek to do two things related to new technologies: conduct and publish research to diagnose how new technologies are affecting families, for better or worse; and, in partnership with prominent technologists, evaluate the ways that technologies can be designed and deployed to improve family life, give parents more power, and, we hope, reignite the domestic economy to give parents better professional options and the flexibility to enact their preferred child care arrangement. 

This big social shift also presents an extraordinary opportunity, in which it might be possible to install the family at the center of our technological lives. Instead of technologies being developed solely for military and corporate benefit, and then, as a last consideration, commodified to families—can families emerge as a first thought in the minds of the technology industry and can they design technology with the specific goal of advancing the family interest? What that would look like in both principle and detail are wide open questions.

Bullivant: What can we expect in 2025 and 2026 from the Family First Technology Initiative?

Toscano: Well, Wendy Wang and I have a few new pieces of research coming out based on a survey on technology with YouGov. Up next, we will be putting out new data on A.I. relationships, A.I. boyfriends and girlfriends, and how Americans feel about them. 

We also have a big research report with a great scholar—more on that soon—on the “Failure to Launch,” which will cover a wide array of issues, but will focus on addiction to electronics, particularly video games. Every year, we will be probing more deeply into the ways in which immersion into the digital world has totally transformed us and our families. As for the policy side, I’d rather keep it under my hat. Surprise is one of the few advantages we have.